{"id":60,"date":"2020-03-12T18:12:42","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T05:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/anthnav\/?page_id=60"},"modified":"2021-07-14T15:06:19","modified_gmt":"2021-07-14T03:06:19","slug":"history-of-the-discipline","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/anthnav\/about-social-anth\/history-of-the-discipline\/","title":{"rendered":"History of the Discipline"},"content":{"rendered":"
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American anthropologist Franz Boas – posing for figure in USNM exhibit entitled – Hamats’a coming out of secret room – 1895 or before. National Anthropology Archives (NAA)<\/p><\/div>\n

The roots of contemporary social anthropology are in the European Enlightenment.<\/strong> At that time there was a push for a systematic, scientific study of human beings. New theories of biological evolution influenced this quest in the 1800s, spilling into ideas of social<\/em> evolution<\/strong>, which created a strong emphasis on describing and comparing people’s cultures via \u2018ethnology<\/strong>\u2019.\u00a0(Note! Ethnology<\/span> is\u00a0not the same thing as ethnography<\/span>).<\/em><\/p>\n

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Anthropological societies started popping up around the world in the late 1800s to support these interests.\u00a0This was mostly an era of \u2018armchair anthropology<\/strong>\u2019 – with study and debate conducted by scholars in European and North American institutions, based on existing paper records, e.g. from explorers or missionaries.<\/p>\n

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Fieldwork-based anthropology<\/h1>\n

Traditions of anthropological fieldwork\u00a0began in the early 1900s, with people like Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas (consider the ‘forefathers’ of contemporary anthropology, and whose influence is discussed in this video<\/a>) travelling to study different groups of people for months or years at a time, in order to learn about their lives and habits, and teaching their students to do the same.<\/p>\n

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American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, pictured in 1948. Source: Smithsonian Institution Archives.<\/p><\/div>\n

Women such as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, also conducted groundbreaking fieldwork and were prominent public voices in their time.<\/p>\n

From these roots, two slightly different traditions of anthropology grew; in the UK the term \u2018social anthropology<\/strong>\u2019 prevailed, whereas the term \u2018cultural anthropology<\/strong>\u2019 was preferred in the USA. The first paragraph of this webpage<\/a> gives an explanation of the slightly different focusses of each tradition. In New Zealand today both names are used, at different institutions, with very little difference in content or focus.<\/p>\n

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Schools of Thought<\/h1>\n

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Some core ideas within social anthropology have persisted throughout its history, giving continuity to the field. For example, the technique of cross-cultural comparison<\/strong>, the approach of holism<\/strong>, and of cultural relativism<\/strong>. You can read about all of these in our Thinking<\/strong><\/a> section.<\/p>\n

Over time, however, the discipline has also been shaped by a number of different schools of thought. Most were associated with one or more major influential scholars. We recommend this 5min MACAT video<\/a> for an accessible \u2018nutshell\u2019 picture of how the ideas developed and progressed, one after another, to create the anthropology we know today.<\/p>\n

If you want to go a little more in-depth, a few of the main schools of thought were:<\/p>\n

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